ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WILLIAM COFFEY U. S. NAVY This is Chuck Nichols with the National Museum of the Pacific War, April, 2003. I’m sitting in the conference room of the National Museum of the Pacific War with William Coffey who was a submariner during World War II and I’m going to talk to him about his experiences. Mr. Coffey, will you tell us when and where you were born, please? MR. COFFEY: I was born in Hopkins County Texas on the 16th of October, 1919. MR. NICHOLS: And you had brothers and sisters? MR. COFFEY: My parents were John S. and Vivian Coffey. I was the ninth of ten children. I was born on a farm two and a half miles west of Sulphur Springs in Hopkins County. MR. NICHOLS: Did you go to school in Sulphur Springs? MR. COFFEY: I went to school in Sulphur Springs and in those days to get to ride the school bus to school, you had to live five miles from town. We only lived two and a half miles from town, so the school bus would pass us every day as we trudged down the road to school. In those days, there were only eleven grades in Texas, so I went from the first through the 11th grade up that highway to Sulphur Springs. MR. NICHOLS: Did they have all grades in the same building? MR. COFFEY: No, they had the first through the sixth grades and they called that the ward school, elementary school. The seventh grade was in a building by itself, and then eight, nine, ten and eleven were the high school which was in one building. MR. NICHOLS: And they only had eleven grades at that time? MR. COFFEY: At that time there were only eleven grades in school in Texas. I thought I learned everything I needed to know in those eleven grades. MR. NICHOLS: And when you graduated from high school, what did you do? MR. COFFEY: I graduated from high school in the spring of 1936 and on the first of November, 1936, I hitchhiked to Dallas, which was oh, roughly ninety miles away, with twin brothers who wanted to join the marines. We went to the marine recruiting station first and the marines accepted them, and told me to go out and eat two or three bananas 1 and come back because I only weighed about 125 pounds soaking wet. I was nearly six foot tall. Instead of that, I went straight to the navy recruiting office and talked to those folks. I was accepted for enlistment but I had to wait until March of 1937 because there was that many people on the waiting list to go into the navy at that time. MR. NICHOLS: Did any of your brothers go into the military? MR. COFFEY: During World War II, I had three brothers and we were all four in the service. My oldest brother was in the army in what they call the CID today. My next brother was in the Seabees. He spent a tour in Iceland and came back and they sent him to Saipan in ’44. I enlisted in the navy in March of ’37, and my youngest brother quit A&M and joined the navy and he was killed in September of ’43. He was aviation radioman and he got shot. They were flying out of New Georgia up north and he was severely wounded and died on Guadalcanal in a hospital. MR. NICHOLS: What type of airplane was he on? MR. COFFEY: It was him and the pilot, radioman and the pilot, I don’t remember, some kind of fighter plane but I don’t know what kind. MR. NICHOLS: You were actually in the military then when World War II started. MR. COFFEY: Yes. When I was shipped into the navy I was sent to San Diego for boot camp which lasted three months in those days. When I finished boot camp in June of ’37, they sent us to a receiving station and we rode the oiler THE CUYAMA from San Diego up to Long Beach to catch the OKLAHOMA, battleship PB37. In those days there was no air transportation or commercial transportation. You went the first available transportation. You went to a receiving station and waited until a ship that was going the way you were going came by and then they put you on it for the ride. MR. NICHOLS: And what did boot camp consist of? MR. COFFEY: There was a lot of drilling and very heavy on physical training and learning about the navy. They were very strong on personal hygiene. They had people come into the navy in those days that didn’t even know how to brush their teeth. We were issued a two and a half gallon bucket and a scrub brush with your sea bag. Whatever clothes you wore today, you washed them tonight and hung them out on the cloths line to dry. The bucket was part of the gear you were issued when you went to boot camp. 2 MR. NICHOLS: Did you live in barracks? MR. COFFEY: Yes, we slept in hammocks in a bag. Our company commanders, there were two of them a chief gunner’s mate and a chief quartermaster, and we spent a lot of time out on the ground near the drill field. North Island is right across the bay from the training station at San Diego. I was fascinated with the PBYs that were continually taking off and landing there in the water by Marsh Island. One of my company commanders told me one day, “Coffey, you like those blankety blank airplanes so much, you lay down and you hold your rifle full arm’s length and you can look at those planes as long as you want to.” That liked to have scared me to death, but I held that rifle up there until I thought my arms were going to fall off. He finally let me get up, and I can assure you, I never spent too much time looking at PBYs again. MR. NICHOLS: The PBY was relatively new at that time, wasn’t it? MR. COFFEY: It was a large two-engine, yes, they were relatively new. MR. NICHOLS: It didn’t have any kind of landing gear on it. MR. COFFEY: No, well it had a hull like a ship’s hull but they also had two wheels. You couldn’t run it on the ground. When those wheels came down and they could attach it up out of the water onto the ramp up the landing apron on its own power. They did not land on the ground. MR. NICHOLS: What kind of chow did you have? MR. COFFEY: It was good, I thought. We had baked beans and cornbread and either prunes or figs every Tuesday and every Saturday morning. They would have roast chicken or fried chicken on Sunday, and we had pot roast and stew and hot dogs and chili. I thought the food was good. Over the years, I think there has come to be two different definitions of SOS. What we called SOS was creamed chipped beef on toast. And the other was some minced beef. We had SOS as a regular diet. As a matter of fact, I liked it. I still like it. When I rode the CUYAMA, an oil tanker, from San Diego to Long Beach, she was empty. The ocean was very calm and I got very sick. That’s the first time I ever got seasick. I got over it. MR. NICHOLS: Did you take some technical training then up at Long Beach or did you have some during basic? 3 MR. COFFEY: No, I went aboard and went to the Second Division of the OKLAHOMA as a seaman second. I learned how to hold a field day on Friday mornings use the whole _____ and working parties. My battle station was in the bottom of number 2 turret when I first started. I was an ammunition handler and sort of worked up from there. The OKLAHOMA was a fine ship. At that time, there were 990 officers and men. When I left there in 194l there were nearly 1500 on her. The crew had been built up that much. MR. NICHOLS: Were you at Pearl Harbor on the OKLAHOMA? MR. COFFEY: I left the OKLAHOMA in April of 1941, and I rode the HENDERSON transport, the navy transport, out to the Philippines. In late 1940, a message had come out asking for volunteers for submarines in the Asiatic Fleet. I thought that would be a pretty good deal, so I volunteered for it and was accepted. I was a second class cook at the time. Going out on the HENDERSON I got sick. I was working in the galley and somehow or other I had some bad food. I got sick and I ended up in the hospital at Cavite. When we arrived in Manila, and when I got out of the hospital, all the billets were taken. So they sent me down to the receiving station at Corite in the navy yard to await further orders. A new merchant ship, the SS FRED NORRIS out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, was being converted to a submarine tender at that time in the navy yard. Her name was to be the USS OTUS, AS20, and when they finally got her far enough along, they commissioned her and I was sent to her for duty.